Scalera - Creating comics start to finish: top pros reveal the complete creative process

• Mike Marts, Mark Waid, Chris Eliopoulos, Brian Haberlin, Rodney Ramos, Darick Robertson, John Cerilli and, of course, Joe Quesada and Stan Lee all for making the time for interviews and for sharing so much of yourselves for this book.

• Jim McLauchlin of The Hero Initiative and Mike Kelly of POW! Entertainment for connecting me with Stan Lee.

• George Beliard of Marvel Comics for helping me connect with Joe Quesada.

• Dan Reilly for key reference materials.

• Fred Pierce for allowing us to use Valiant images.

• Stefanie Laufersweiler and Kelly Messerly for the top-notch editing on this project. You guys made every page and every chapter better than I could have done alone.

• Pam Wissman for opening the doors and welcoming me into IMPACT. You made all of this possible.

• Alan Evans for (yet another) great cover. It's good to be a team again.

• Designer Wendy Dunning, production editor Sarah Laichas, copyeditor Jeff Suess, proofreader John Kuehn, indexer Kathleen Rocheleau and production coordinator Mark Griffin.

• Special thanks to my transcribers Misha Stewart and Amy Jeynes.

THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill you STAY IN WONDERLAND, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Morpheus to Neo in The Matrix

You may not want to read this book. There's stuff in here that will change the way you read comics. I'm not kidding. Let me tell you a quick story, just to prove my point.

Back when I was starting college I became interested in film studies. This was way back before comics had gained the level of mainstream respect that they enjoy today, so if you wanted to learn about visual storytelling, film was the way to go. Like comics, you could tell stories and communicate with words and pictures, so film was an irresistible magnet for comic geeks like me.

In a lot of ways, film studies are a great way for comic book fans to analyze and understand the nature of visual storytelling. The two mediums film and comics have much in common. Of course, these days, many educational institutions teach comic book curriculum, so your learning options are much broader and more relevant.

Still, you may not want to read this book. It's going to do for you what film school did for me. It's going to ruin the mystique.

They warned us on the first day of class that the critical analysis of film will reveal the language of the medium. It will uncover the techniques, the business and the tricks of the art form. That kind of understanding and enlightenment strips away the magic to reveal how the trick works.